Rachel here: When this whole Lost theme first presented itself, I immediately decided that I wanted to have a pig roast (if you watch the show then you know that hunting wild boars is where it's at meat-wise). Surprisingly enough, this goal promptly shifted from fantastic to fantastically impossible. First, there's the whole issue of purchasing a whole pig. While I'm pretty confident that had I applied myself I would have located one (there are few things culinarily speaking that can't be found around here), other issues around this whole pig began cropping up. For instance, how does one keep a whole pig refrigerated? Would I have to fill my bathtub with ice like my friends and I did in college (my first go-round) to make the world's largest gin and tonic (wow, upon recalling that incident, I'm feeling like that may need to be revisited one day in a blog post of its own)? How would I season it? Then I started tallying all of the pork eaters I know and realized that I know waaaaaay too many vegetarians and vegans. And then, the final issue, is that it's illegal to have fires in your backyard here. There was no way in hell I was going to roast a pig indoors, due to the size of my oven, sure, but mostly due to the fact that half of the point of roasting a pig in the first place is to turn it on a spit over a fire. So anyway, as you can tell, within seconds my pig roast fantasy was obliterated. It was tragic, but I bounced back.
What I ended up making was a recipe I found on the Food Network's website called Pig on a Stick (click on the link to see the recipe). Before I even read the recipe, I think I had decided to make it based on the name alone. Pig on a Stick is the sort of name I would come up with for a recipe. It's very literal and to the point and it highlights the funnest part of the meal: eating off a stick. I made a few modifications, but only for convenience. First, I cooked my pork on my stovetop because I didn't feel like dealing with the whole broiler pan thing (bending over is officially number one on my list of things to avoid these days). Second, I used apricot preserves instead of orange marmalade in the sauce because somehow between leaning all the way over to pull the marmalade off the bottom shelf at the grocery store and retrieving it from my shopping bag upon returning home my orange marmalade turned into apricot preserves. In true island survivor fashion, though, I pushed ahead. The end result, John (and I) will have you know, is one of the most delicious meals I have EVER made. I served the jerk pork with couscous (cooked with a little lime juice, salt and butter) and corn-on-the-cob (the first good ears we've had this year and all the yummier for that fact). Most importantly, though, I will be making this jerk pork again and again in the future.
Anyway, thanks for joining/indulging us in our Lost obsession for the past few days. We'll be moving on to other topics tomorrow, but we'll always have a little bit of the island in our hearts (and, whether you've watched the show or not, we hope you will, too, through the recipes we've featured this week).
